In recent years a range of public policy (Howlett 2000) and international relations (Cutler et al., 1999; Hurd, 1999; Haufler, 2001) scholars have devoted attention to the emergence of voluntary (Kernaghan 1999; Prakash 1999), market-based, and “private” regulatory regimes that have emerged to address matters of concern to global civil society that previously were largely addressed through state-centered public policy instruments and processes.

In recent years programs of private regulation have spread from North America and Europe to developing countries around the world. Though central to debates over public versus private international governance, little is known about the actual operations of these programs, especially in developing countries where weak state regulation has failed for decades to control environmental degradation. This paper assesses the effectiveness in Argentina of two prominent global private environmental regulatory programs'the chemical industry's Responsible Care® program and the Forest Stewardship Council. Argentina presents an intriguing country case because, despite conditions and policies that should support such programs, their implementation there has been stunted when compared against other regional cases. A focus on the demand and supply factors that shape these programs in Argentina reveals that market demand is a necessary but insufficient condition for regime effectiveness. Supply-side factors such as industry characteristics, public policies, and the institutional culture of firms significantly influence program implementation. Some transnational corporations helped export these program to Argentina; however, many others have shown opposition or disinterest, stifling program development. Also, feckless and unstable state agencies have created an institutional environment unfavorable even for private initiatives aimed at bypassing government interference.

The private prison industry is a multi-million-dollar industry that has increasingly profited from the detention of undocumented immigrants. As a government contractor, therefore, the industry has a natural interest in government decision making, including legislation that can affect its expansion into immigrant detention. In this article, we examine the relationship between campaign donations made on behalf of the private prison industry and an untested form of position taking—bill cosponsorship—in the US House of Representatives. We hypothesize the private prison industry will reward House members for taking positions that benefit the industry. We also hypothesize the private prison industry will also reward House members who incur greater political risk by taking positions out of sync with the party. To test our hypotheses, we focus on punitive immigration legislation that has the potential to increase the supply of immigrant detainees over the course of eight years. We find support for our second hypothesis, that private prison companies are more likely to reward House Democrats who cosponsor punitive immigration policies even after accounting for possible endogeneity. The findings have important implications regarding the relationship between House members and private interests.

Over the last 20 years, developing countries have witnessed the increased role of non-governmental actors such as health industry associations and umbrella organizations in the diffusion and governance of health innovation. Utilizing extensive interviews with actors in the Indian and South African health industries, this paper argues that, in a context of emerging pluralism – i.e., a dynamic context of bargaining between competing (public and private) interests and values – these associations constitute public actors that play dual roles in the politics of innovation and development. Specifically, not only do they engage downstream by diffusing knowledge to their respective health innovation systems in order to achieve common objectives, they also engage upstream with their governments to co-develop policies and regulations. This dual role of health industry associations and umbrella organizations makes them less neutral politically but more effective institutionally, and their innovative and political role should be seriously taken into account in the healthcare sector.

This study examines the relationships between deregulation, business strategy (low cost, differentiation, and scope), size, and firm performance in the U.S. airline industry based on archival data for the Major, National, and Large Regional air carriers in the U.S. from 1972 to 1995. Cross-sectional time series regression analysis shows that deregulation had a significant impact on the strategic choices made by airlines. Results also support a significant relationship between business strategy and firm performance. Further, the study found that firm size moderates the environment-business strategy relationship and the business strategy-firm performance relationship, thereby supporting the salience of firm size as a contingency variable in strategy studies.

In the 1990s, there was a lot of concern in studies of post-communism about communist-era managers stalling institutional reforms due to their ability to gain long-term advantages through institutional capture. By influencing market governance rules (corporate governance, bankruptcy, competition laws), managers could protect and amplify initial economic gains from liberalization, entrenching economic inequality. Yet in the 2000s, even the laggards of transition have implemented significant market governance reforms and have enjoyed rapid economic growth. Moreover, business perceptions of state capture (from BEEPS) have dropped substantially. The paper examines this surprising turnaround with evidence from the Romanian case. I argue that contrary to expectations, business interests have failed to capture market governance institutions. In spite of benefiting from shady privatization deals and other advantages based on political connections, the new Romanian entrepreneurs were not threatened by sophisticated market governance laws. This argument based on the preferences of business actors is a necessary addition to explanations of institutional reforms that rely on international conditionality or on economic crisis.

This special issue focuses on the difficulties of negotiating the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), with contributions by scholars from different perspectives. This introductory article briefly examines the trend to mega-FTAs of which TTIP is a leading example. It then reviews the contributions to this special issue, drawing on an analytical approach that reflects extant work on transnational and transgovernmental relations. This approach, we contend, helps to understand the stark mismatch between the desire of some parties to negotiate binding trade rules on behind-the-border regulatory policies in certain key sectors of national economies and the progress made in TTIP talks. We then highlight the significance of some key actors in a case study of failed E.U. attempts to include financial sector reforms and associated regulatory processes in TTIP.

The myriad applications of artificial intelligence (AI) by the private and public sectors have exploded in the public consciousness in the postpandemic period. However, researchers and businesses have been working on AI technology applications for decades, and in many ways, governments are rushing to catch up. This article presents an argument that the future of AI policy in the United States will be driven in large part by current and future state-level policy experiments. This argument is presented by drawing on scholarship surrounding federalism, regulatory fragmentation, and the effects of fragmentation on business and social equity. The article then presents the case of autonomous vehicle policy in the states to illustrate the degree of current fragmentation and considers the effects of layering new AI policies on top of existing rules surrounding privacy, licensing, and more. Following this consideration of existing research and its application of AI policy, the article presents a research agenda for leveraging state differences to study the effects of AI policy and develop a cohesive framework for governing AI.

Private regulations are often presented as low-cost and flexible institutions that can act as policy incubators. In this article, I question under which conditions they go beyond legal compliance and experiment with new rules. Based on a content analysis of 126 data privacy regulations adopted between 1995 and 2016 in the European Union and the United States and thirty-five semistructured interviews, I show that most private regulations include no regulatory novelties. By disaggregating the temporal and spatial distribution of the few novelties, I add nuance to this overall finding and show that private regulations adopted in the United States before 2000 experimented more than others. I argue that this variation reflects the different demands for private regulation in the two jurisdictions and their evolution over time. In the European Union, the early adoption of privacy laws led public regulators and businesses to look for private regulations to reduce transaction costs and thus limited their interest in experimenting with new requirements. In the United States, businesses hoped to gain a first-mover advantage by including new data privacy rules in their private regulations. However, the growing use of private regulations to ease transnational data flows also led to their use as tools to reduce transaction costs.

The paper illustrates a practical framework for understanding and predicting political economy risk for project managers operating in a variety of developing country settings, including non-democracies, ethnically diverse environments and societies undergoing political transition. In doing so, the paper also develops a number of novel cases illustrating the effectiveness of this framework in helping us understand both surprising success and failure in the realms of sustainable, private sector and human development. These cases include Tata Nano's difficulties in locating its automobile plant in West Bengal, how a small NGO, the Mehta Foundation, helped secure passage of green fuel mandates in Delhi over strong political opposition, and the sustained success of Mexico's pioneering conditional cash transfer program-Progressa/Oportunidades – in an environment of dramatic political regime change.

This study examines the effects of two major environmental jolts, the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 and the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks, on strategic change and performance in the U.S. air carrier industry. The sample includes the Major U.S. air carriers during two periods of time: deregulation (1974-1986) and 9/11/2001 (1997-2008). Data were collected from archival sources and analyzed using cross-sectional time series regressions with fixed effects. The results show that following both environmental jolts, the initial response of the airlines was emphasis on cost control. However, over the long run, there was a deceleration of the emphasis on cost control. Further, following deregulation, the long run response involved the acceleration of differentiation change. We also found a significant relationship between strategic change and firm performance. The results contribute towards a reconciliation of the conflicting predictions of the repetitive momentum hypothesis and the deceleration hypothesis.

Since the 1970s many firms expanded their operations across national borders and were restructured to fit the changing economic conditions during these times of economic globalization. Using a sociological approach to transnational firms, in this article the authors research the consequences of these developments for the responsibility of two transnational firms towards their employees in the Netherlands. These firms experienced a shift in their dual embeddedness in national and transnational economic fields, with the latter gaining importance. In response, they adjusted their corporate policies and structure to fit the competitive conditions of these fields, causing a centralization of their corporate labor policy on the transnational level, the polarization of this policy and the instrumentalization of labor and labor policy. This also meant that their responsibility for their employees was restructured and reduced.

Political economists have paid increasing attention to distinctions between exporting and nonexporting firms, particularly with regard to their preferences on trade policy liberalization. A multitude of past studies focusing on economically advanced democracies characterized exporters as a small, elite group of large and highly productive firms, but this profile of a prototypical exporter is not necessarily representative of the body of firms operating under different domestic contexts. Using current and methodologically consistent cross-national surveys of firms conducted by the World Bank, this paper re-evaluates the link between certain firm-level characteristics and firms’ propensity to export, taking into account how national-level political, economic, and geographic conditions affect these relationships. The pooled sample of firms from approximately 100 countries spanning different political regimes and levels of development confirms that, generally speaking, exporters are large, productive, and innovative. However, in less democratic and less developed settings, productivity and innovation do not appear to be a prerequisite to export orientation. When developing generalizable theories of firms’ participation in the policymaking process, we must therefore be careful not to treat export behavior as an unqualified predictor of pro-free-trade attitudes.

For more than a decade, political science scholars have stressed the harmonizing effect of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs). Recent implementation practices in developing countries, however, have challenged this view. In this article, I argue that different manifestations of innovation systems can lead to varying patterns of innovation. I substantiate this claim through a comparison between the pharmaceutical sectors of India and Brazil. Drawing on the NSI approach, my analysis reveals that different forms of state engagement have played a decisive role for the varying directions of post-TRIPs pharmaceutical innovation in the two countries. The article illustrates that developing countries can opt for different approaches to innovation even after TRIPs and that the socioeconomic effects of global IP regimes can only be assessed properly when taking into account the country-specific configurations of national innovation systems.

Existing theories of individual trade preferences do not satisfactorily explain how security concerns should affect American support for the US–China trade war that began in 2018. Although existing theories of public attitudes toward international trade—economic self-interest, sociotropism, partisanship, reciprocity, and xenophobia—all help to explain initial support for the trade war, these hypotheses do not adequately explain citizen attitudes in the context of an increasingly adversarial and securitized bilateral US–China relationship. In particular, they do not address how rising security tensions affect trade preferences. Using nationally representative original survey data (n = 1,016) and a nonrepresentative survey with an embedded experiment (n = 1,015), this article argues that securitization of the bilateral economic relationship has spurred threat perceptions and given rise to a Cold War narrative that has in turn caused a substantial share of Americans to become less concerned with the economic outcomes of trade and more concerned with trade's effect on security. These Americans demonstrate an instinctive “commercial peace” response, seeing trade liberalization as a potential deterrent to conflict. The results challenge conventional wisdom on political support for the trade war and add depth to existing theories of individual trade preferences regarding the interaction between economic, security, and psychological motivations.

Current explanations of demand for anti-dumping protections focus on the role of the business cycle, and fluctuations in real exchange rates. However, empirical evidence supporting these explanations is based primarily on the experience of industrialized countries. Here, we examine anti-dumping petitions in a broader sample of thirty-four industrialized and middle income countries from 1978–2015. We also propose a new determinant of demand for anti-dumping petitions—changes in the pattern of industrial production between developed and developing economies over this period have contributed to deindustrialization in advanced economies and premature industrialization some developing countries. These changes threaten established industries and motivate them to demand protection.

This paper examines the influence of three different forms of global economic engagement on the lobbying behavior of US businesses with regard to trade relations with China: (a) input sourcing; (b) downstream export; and (c) vertical foreign direct investment. It will be hypothesized that firms involved in all three forms of global economic activities should have incentives to lobby over China-related trade issues in order to maintain unimpeded access to sources of supply or markets and to ensure the smooth operation of the entire supply chain. Going further, drawing on the exit-voice framework developed by Albert Hirschman (1972), it will be argued that compared to firms in those industries mainly involved in input sourcing from China, American multinational corporations that have verticalized their production should have even stronger incentives to engage in lobbying activities and “voice” their policy preferences due to their greater “sunk costs” and hence the higher cost of “exit.” Statistical analysis of the China trade-related lobbying activities of US firms between 2006 and 2016 lends substantial support to these conjectures.

There is a continuing need for an analytical approach to institutional change, especially as applied to incremental, agent-driven change. Important institutional change can be incremental and not necessarily linked to immediate crisis. Institutional adjustments initiated by actors in the course of meeting specific economic and political goals can unblock systemic bottlenecks leading to improved economic performance. Aggregate incremental change could also lead to system evolution that deviates significantly from the original system model. This paper presents an approach that engages agent impact on the institutional system, and the political or social motives for action; the two-tiered approach moves away from the categories described in Varieties of Capitalism, one of the more influential approaches to analyzing institutional impact in an economy. Instead of static national categories, the approach presented in this paper differentiates between defining institutions and instrumental institutions, the differences in ease and speed of change which characterize each institutional tier, and how the system's evolution is impacted by the combined effect of changes in each tier. Differentiating between institutions in this manner, the paper provides an approach that is more flexible in explaining the interactions between agents and institutions, and the changes which may result.

This paper tackles the question of trade strategy and differential economic performance in Latin America, with a focus on the four countries—Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico—most important for the successful completion of a full Western Hemispheric integration scheme. The analysis distinguishes between a ‘standard’ market strategy that assigns the task of economic adjustment to market forces, and a ‘competitive’ strategy that more actively employs a range of public policies to facilitate adjustment and correct for instances of market failure. The choices of strategy are explored against the backdrop of international pressures, government business relations, and institutional reform within the state. Two main conclusions are drawn: first, the competitive strategy strongly correlates with more favorable macro- and microeconomic outcomes and, second, mediocre economic performance under a standard market strategy has undermined the spirit of collective action that will be necessary to forge ahead at the hemispheric level.

The U.S. is no longer providing leadership in trade policy. In recent years, we have seen a sharp turn toward a rapid proliferation of bilateral preferential trade agreements, accords that are likely to undermine the World Trade Organization (WTO). By pursuing a strategy of ‘competitive liberalization’ both on a sectoral basis under the Bill Clinton administration, and then a policy of seeking bilateral arrangements under the George W. Bush administration, this article argues that American administrations have undermined the coalition for free trade in the United States. Consequently, protectionist industries including textiles, steel, and agriculture have made further liberalization more difficult and thus the prospects for promoting continued trade liberalization have grown dimmer.